University of Illinois

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Here's a flashback into religion-beat history, with the help of the legendary Lou Grant

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Here's a flashback into religion-beat history, with the help of the legendary Lou Grant

If anyone ever writes a book about the history of religion news in the mainstream press it will need to include a photo of the glowering, and often smirking, mug of Lou Grant.

Lou Grant was a TV character, of course, played by the Emmy-winning actor Ed Asner, who died on Sunday (August 29) at age 91. But for millions of Americans, he provided -- in "The Mary Tyler Moore Show" and the sequel "Lou Grant" -- an archetypal image of what old-school journalism was all about.

One 1977 "Lou Grant" episode certainly captured some of the attitudes I encountered while interviewing journalists for my 1982 graduate project at the University of Illinois in Urbana-Champaign, which focused on why few newsrooms made serious attempts to cover religion events and trends -- unless they were linked to politics.

Quite a few editors sounded like Lou Grant.

In this episode, entitled "Sect," the city editor of the mythical Los Angeles Tribune was wrestling with two problems at the same time. The problems seemed to be unrelated.

First, the Trib had lost its veteran religion editor. Grant searched and searched, but no one was interested in filling that empty desk. After all, what self-respecting journalist wanted to be stuck with the religion beat?

Problem number two was how to get rid of lazy, often-drunk, no-good reporter Mal Cavanaugh. All through this episode the newsroom's leaders had been searching for a way to get Cavanaugh to resign. Then came a spark of inspiration. The printed script is simple:

LOU: Well, Mal, you've been with this paper a mighty long time. As you say, this is your family.

CAVANAUGH: (All that humility) Aw, well, it's nice to be appreciated.

LOU: And I think I've found a place where we'll be able to use that special, sweet style that is Mal Cavanaugh.

CAVANAUGH: (Those eyes are getting moist; he sees himself getting a column) What's that, Lou?

LOU: Congratulations, Mal. You're the Trib's new religion editor.


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New podcast: What could go wrong? NYTimes explores Facebook's religious ambitions

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New podcast: What could go wrong? NYTimes explores Facebook's religious ambitions

Truth be told, I am not prone to flashbacks — even though I did come of age in the late 1960s and early 1970s.

Anyway, I had a big flashback recently while reading a very interesting New York Times feature that ran with this headline: “Facebook’s Next Target: The Religious Experience.” In this case, the subhead is also crucial: “The company is intensifying formal partnerships with faith groups across the United States and shaping the future of religious experience.”

Whoa. What does “shaping the future of religious experience” mean? I imagine that to learn details, readers would have to hear from some of the participants in this trailblazing online work. But there’s a problem with that. When asked about some specifics, an official with the Atlanta branch of the trendy Hillsong Church couldn’t answer, because “he had signed a nondisclosure agreement.”

Don’t you hate it when that happens?

Anyway, here’s the passage the stirred up lots of conversation, and my multi-decade flashback, during the recording of this week’s “Crossroads” podcast (click here to tune that in).

A Facebook spokeswoman said the data it collected from religious communities would be handled the same way as that of other users, and that nondisclosure agreements were standard process for all partners involved in product development.

Many of Facebook’s partnerships involve asking religious organizations to test or brainstorm new products, and those groups seem undeterred by Facebook’s larger controversies. This year Facebook tested a prayer feature, where members of some Facebook groups can post prayer requests and others can respond. The creator of YouVersion, the popular Bible app, worked with the company to test it.

Now, combine that mind-spinning information with this passage, which very gently raises the issue that millions of Americans — on the cultural right and left — are convinced that the Facebook gods have lost control of much of the information that is located on their platform:

The company’s effort to court faith groups comes as it is trying to repair its image among Americans who have lost confidence in the platform, especially on issues of privacy. Facebook has faced scrutiny for its role in the country’s growing disinformation crisis and breakdown of societal trust, especially around politics, and regulators have grown concerned about its outsize power.

This brings me to my flashback to a graduate-school class at the University of Illinois in Urbana-Champaign that changed my life.


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The crucial 'M' word -- Methodist -- that needed to be in every Hugh Hefner obituary

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This is how I will remember him: Articulate, witty, with a probing intellect, He was a strong First Amendment liberal, a lover of music, magazines and books. And there was the pipe, of course. He'd look over the top of his glasses, puffing on the pipe, while he was thinking.

I'm talking about Theodore Peterson, of course, the legendary journalism professor at the University of Illinois in Urbana-Champaign whose class on modern magazines was a rite of passage for thousands of young writers and editors.

Take Hugh Hefner, for example.

If you took Peterson's class (as I did in graduate school), you learned quite a bit about the back-story on Hefner and the class-project dream that years later turned into a magazine celebrating sex and grown-up toys, linking consumerism with moral libertarianism.

Peterson had a theory about modern magazines, which was that -- while providing niche content for readers and advertisers -- they needed to make some kind of statement about the personality and beliefs of the founder. They needed to sell a worldview. Hefner was the perfect example and the key was the Playboy-in-chief's desire to shed his past and escape.

Escape what? That is where morality and religion -- the old Methodism -- is an essential part of the Hefner story and, thus, any obituary that attempts to sum up his life. I'm not joking: Editors may want to consider allowing religion-beat reporters to take part in the coverage of Hef and his legacy. After all, the Sexual Revolution was a new take on a very ancient religion.

As you would expect, the Hefner obituaries are packed with colorful symbolic details. There's speculation on the number of women he bedded. What about the implications of his emotional immaturity, when linked to a 152 IQ? Do the math and you end up with the 2,500-plus volumes of his personal scrapbook, which probably featured images from the $40,000 video-camera system above his 7-foot round bed.

News consumers can expect, in the follow-up coverage, lots of debate about Hefner as feminist or anti-feminist. Was he a figure of liberation, oppression or addiction? Was his fierce support of abortion rights rather self-serving? Someone should ask fake-bunny Gloria Steinem, or perhaps Holly Madison, author of "Down the Rabbit Hole: Curious Adventures and Cautionary Tales of a Former Playboy Bunny."

In most of the obituaries, there is some kind of reference to Hefner's parents and their religious convictions. The Associated Press feature, as one would expect, had less room with which to work, but did manage this telling passage:


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Religion ghost? Concerning the shocking Gallup numbers about public trust in news media

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A long, long time ago, I wrote my journalism graduate project at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign about -- I am sure this will be a shock -- why so many mainstream newsrooms tend to ignore (or mangle) the role that religion plays in local, national and global news. Click here for the condensed version of that project that ran as a cover story with The Quill.

When talking to newspaper editors back in academic year 1981-82, I heard two things over and over: (1) religion news is too boring and (2) religion news is too controversial.

As I have said many times, the world is just packed with boring, controversial religion stories. The only way to make sense out of those answers, I thought at the time, was that editors considered these stories "boring" and they could not understand why so many readers cared so deeply about religious events, issues and trends.

At one point in that project, I discussed research done for the Connecticut Mutual Life Insurance Company late in the 1970s. Yes, that was long ago. However, I believe some of those survey results remain relevant today, as we consider the stunning numbers in a new Gallup Poll that indicate that consumer trust in the American news media has crashed to a new low.

We will come back to those numbers in a moment. The key question: Is the public attitude toward the press linked, in some way, to issues of media bias in coverage of moral, cultural and religious news, as well as the predictable levels of anger linked to coverage of the remarkably unpopular major-party candidates in this year's White House race.

So back to 1980 or so. The Connecticut Mutual Life study found, as I wrote for The Quill, that:

... (The) sector of the public that is the most religiously involved is also highly involved in the local news events that dominate daily newspapers. ... About 20 percent of all Americans, a group the survey calls the "most religious," are the people most likely to be involved in, and interested in local news. The survey shows:


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